Saturday, 30 June 2012

Villain of the week for the global chattering classes is Bob Diamond, an American banker with an epic string
of titles. He is 'Group Chief Executive of Barclays plc’, ‘CE of Corporate & Investment Banking and Wealth Management’, and ‘Executive
Director of the Boards of Barclays plc and Barclays Bank plc’. It reminds me of the Homeric King (basileus)Agamemnon, King of Kings, Most
Kingy (basileutatos) even among the Very Kingy Indeed, and of All Islands King.

Bob's Hair Colourant

When I was young, Barclay’s made profits from the oppressive
regimes of a cabal of South American military dictators. But the bank is now dodgily
fixing LIBOR. The process of secretly manipulating something that sounds like a
mixture of LIQUOR, LIVER and LIBERTINE (actually the London Interbank Offered Rate) is (bizarrely) perceived as Going
Too Far even by the totally amoral community of high financiers.

'The Death of Crassus' by Pierre Cousteau (1555)

I don’t myself understand the casuistic distinctions which
self-styled ‘virtuous’ bankers draw between themselves and Diamond. Surely all
financially creamed-off ‘property’ is theft? But Diamond really is under pressure to resign. David
Cameron, whose personal fortune derives partly from his ancestors’ profession
of helping rich people evade taxes, is on one of his hypocritical high horses. He is demanding that Diamond’s head
rolls.

I personally would like to see Bob force-fed molten gold,
the retribution which Cassius Dio says the Parthians devised for the avaricious Roman General Crassus
who thirsted for their wealth. Somewhere in Turkmenistan there is a golden
replica of Crassus’ oesophagus.

But perhaps
for Bob Diamond we need a punishment that has to do with diamonds
instead. I would also enjoy sentencing him to hard labour, with the status of
illegal immigrant, in a dangerous diamond mine where trade unions were banned.

The Very Fishy Alex Salmond

It is fun to associate prominent people’s names with their trades
or physiognomy: the piscine First Minister of
Scotland, Alex Salmond, could not look more like a salmon if he tried. Bob
Diamond could have been called ‘Gold’, or ‘Proffitt’, but ‘Diamond’, appropriately,
implies unparalleled hardness as well as financial excess. Bob Diamond is also a sponger on the rest of
us. A cartoonist like Georgia Poynder (age 12) might draw him as SpongeBob
DiamondPants (see fig. below).

SpongeBob Diamondpants

Even conservative estimates of Bob’s annual salary vary between £1.3-million-plus-17-million-bonuses,
and about three times that much. But speaking as a girl who knows a lot about
artificial hair colorants, my question to Bob Diamond is actually this: given
the enormity of your income, why don’t you invest in a better quality of hair-dye?
Don’t you agree with L’Oreal that you
are self-evidently ‘worth it’?

Sunday, 24 June 2012

Last
night in the open-air Greek theatre looming over the railway station in
Sheffield, the historic heart of the British steel industry, Prometheus was
chained to his crag as a punishment for supporting the advancement of the human race and daring
to speak truth to Zeus, the self-appointed new Dictator of the Universe.

The
production of Henry Stead's beautiful new version of the Aeschylean Prometheus
Bound was mounted by citizens of Sheffield and current and former Classics PhDs at
London, Oxford and the Open Universities, led by my own PhD students Lottie Parkyn and Matt Shipton. Lottie graduated from Birmingham University (see below) and Matt, who comes from Sheffield himself, is studying the suppression of the authentic voices of young people in Athenian drama. The production
was an inspiring example of what such young people can do for culture and community
in the 21st century if given even half a chance.

Abolitionist Prometheus & Heracles (1807)

This great play was adopted in the late 18th and 19th centuries as the
manifesto of the campaign to abolish slavery. It forces its audiences to think about the
potential of humans to create the world they deserve as well as their
eternal vulnerability to sabotage by self-interested ploutocrats, politicians, careerists and "managers".

The
parallels between the crisis in the play and those afflicting international Higher Education are striking. At the University of Virginia, a heroic
President has been ousted for supporting the life of the mind, the culture of the State of Virginia, teachers and students against her
finance-fixated executive board. At Birmingham in England, a cabal of
middle-aged white men (and they are all men)--the Vice-Chancellor
David Eastwood, the Pro Vice-Chancellor and Ancient History Professor Michael Whitby, and a couple of other senior academics--proposes to carve up the available power, salaries and pensions between themselves, while
threatening their juniors with destitution.

Teresa Sullivan, ousted by ploutocrats

The new gods of the Birmingham Olympus have not yet exiled their victims to
aeons of torture in the Caucasus, but they have made it clear that if these terrified young staff
break their "Confidentiality Agreements" they will only worsen their own plight. Just like the whole
jobless, impoverished international generation born since about 1975, the lecturers are being brutally excluded from any
opportunity to participate fully in the institutional dimension of the human
project.

But
Prometheus knew that Zeus was not invulnerable. His gift of fire enabled humans
to arm themselves against poverty, ignorance, joylessness and oppression. The
technology of the Internet has now given the world powerful new ways in which
to unite in support of a fairer and more humane future, as the use of social
networks in major revolutions has resoundingly shown.

David Oyelowo in Aquila Theatre's Prometheus

So did the very much smaller case of the FaceBook
group Save Classics at Royal Holloway, which is to close next Thursday (June 28th 2012) exactly a year after it opened, having
achieved its specific goals. It is being replaced by the new group ClassicsInternational (join if you haven't already: non-Classicists are hugely welcome). Prometheus knows things that Zeus
does not, and can communicate via the Internet
with allies. So tyrants of the academic world--you have been notified!

Friday, 15 June 2012

The teaching of the ancient Greeks and Romans has now come
under fire at Birmingham. It is housed there in the Institute of Archaeology and
Antiquity, which the Vice-Chancellor David Eastwood, a historian with a penchant
for football, has opened up to a violent Penalty Shoot-Out (aka the dreaded “90-day
review” with which RHUL Classics was threatened fifty weeks ago).

Painting by Alma Tadema

Birmingham University has been the home of some of the most
exciting Classics anywhere, ever. It is
the Birmingham Uni Heslop Library that holds Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s photographs of
ancient sculpture, architecture, and archaeological sites, so crucial to his
famous paintings.

It was the amazing Edward Sonnenschein who was in 1883 appointed
the first professor of Greek and Latin at the newly founded Mason College in Birmingham. He then co-founded
the UK Classical Association, and campaigned for the charter for the
University of Birmingham (granted in March 1900), which thereafter became a model for other modern universities. He virtually invented the teaching of Classics in translation to a wide range of Humanities undergraduates.

HELLO! BIRMINGHAM CLASSICS
IS the FOUNDING DEPARTMENT AND CHARTER INSTITUTION OF THE ENTIRE BRITISH
REDBRICK UNIVERSITY PHENOMENON!

Edward Sonnenschein

The richness of the history of Birmingham Classics subsequently
is humbling. The poet Louis MacNeice’s entire life’s work, including Autumn Journal,was informed by his experiences as a lecturer there, especially when he faced classrooms of local
car factory workers. It was in MacNeice’s social circle that W.H. Auden was
inspired to write many of his most famous poems. E.R. Dodds, MacNeice’s patron,
Professor of Greek in the University of
Birmingham, left an indelible mark on Classics as editor of the Bacchae and author of The Greeks and the Irrational.

The most brilliant, if controversial, of Birmingham
classicists was George Thomson, whose Marxist studies of ancient Greek society,
including Aeschylus and Athens, are
still in print after more than six decades.

It was Birmingham University which
gave an honorary degree to Michel Saint-Denis, the epoch-making French theatre
director, who directed Laurence Olivier as Oedipus and Peggy Ashcroft as
Electra at the Old Vic theatre company.

Olivier in Saint-Denis' Oedipus

More recently, the exceptionally erudite and distinguished Donald R. Dudley and C.D.N. Costa put their editions and translations of Tacitus,
Seneca, Lucian and ancient letter-writers indelibly on the cultural map of the
planet. Costa was the sort of quiet hero who unostentatiously, without breathing a word to anyone at work, devoted thousands of hours as a
voluntary prison visitor throughout all his decades of service to Birmingham
scholarship.

I fear this may be taken as a sad obituary of Classics at Birmingham. I hope that V-C David
Eastwood hears it rather more interrogatively. I very much doubt if he has the slightest idea what treasures he has the power to destroy.

Sunday, 10 June 2012

I haven't had the best of weeks. On Sunday the police prevented me and child 2 from waving our ‘Make Monarchy History’ banners at
the royal barge at the Jubilee. They rounded us up along with hundreds of other
Republicans in a street well away from the cameras of the world. But on Tuesday I was caught on video being shouted at myself in a soaking tent in the borderlands of England and
Wales.

Art of the temple of Brauronian Artemis

The context was a festival of ‘philosophy and music’ at Hay
on Wye (not the much larger and more
prestigious literary festival, founded in 1988, which Bill Clinton once
described as ‘the Woodstock of the Mind’).
I am usually quite good at running debates, and was invited to chair a panel asking whether the modern Art Gallery has become a
substitute for the Church (it must be admitted that my sole qualification for
this is that my father is an Anglican priest). I was intrigued by the topic
because in ancient Greece, temples and art galleries were indistinguishable.
The place with all the paintings and the statues and the ‘installations’ was
always a temple complex: the Greeks thought the gods loved art and wanted religious
buildings jam-packed in their honour.

Back in Britain, with loud folk-rock pulsating through the
canvas of the tent, I tried to get the ‘freelance philosopher’ Jonathan Ree going,
plus two of the top people in the Art world: Charles Saumarez
Smith, CEO of the Royal Academy, and Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Modern.

Charles and Penelope agreed that art galleries resemble
churches socially in that there is rivalry between different cities to build
the most splendid new architectural edifice to dominate the local skyline. They
were in absolute disagreement that
visual art could or should have an effect on the viewer of any spiritual or
metaphysical kind—Saumarez Smith thought transcendence possible, while Curtis
thought it was actually undesirable. They both think that the main aim of art
is to invite the viewer to ‘look at looking’, that is, reflect on what s/he is
doing while contemplating the artwork (i.e. in the language of a ‘festival of
philosophy’, do something cognitive or epistemological). All very postmodern,
self-aware, 'sef-reflexive', 'meta-' and (to my mind) so very onanistic and ‘last-century’.

The Turbine Hall at Tate Modern

And then I put my foot in it. My understanding of one of the
reasons why people (used to) go to church is to get moral guidance. Religion
can provide ethical standards, codes of behaviour, and encourage unselfishness
and charity. I asked whether art could or should substitute for the ethical
function of churchgoing. Both luminaries shuddered in absolute horror. How
could I have raised such an obscene question? You would have thought that I had proposed legislation dictating that art could only feature youths in love with
tractors, as in Stalinist ‘socialist realism.’ The implication was that
connecting art and ethics was profoundly dangerous and would lead immediately
to political censorship.

The audience response was fascinating. One woman spoke about how art had given her a reason to live by creating vistas of
hope and possibility when she was widowed. Another suggested that churches were
too conservative and authoritarian in the art that they displayed and should encourage
congregations to participate in
creating inspiring visual environments.

But one middle-aged man launched an
attack on me which was clearly a visceral reaction to the question I had
raised, even though it took a personal form (“How can someone as ignorant as
you be a Professor of Classics?” and “I can’t believe they asked someone with
your ego to chair at this festival!”). I always did know how to charm people.

Horace reciting to Virgil and Maecenas

Ancient critics thought that art was divinely
inspired (Homer) and could give you a metaphysical tingle (Longinus in On the Sublime). But they also agreed
that at its best it was useful to the community as well as pleasurable, utile as well as dulce (Plato, Aristotle, Horace). Yet another reason we need to keep in touch
with the wisdom of our cultural ancestors?

Friday, 1 June 2012

A paranoid tyrant reacts to dissent by issuing absurd
retributive mandates and persecuting the young, the poor, and the vulnerable. Arguments
about common decency from citizens and counsellors fail to make any impression.
Torture and arbitrary death sentences, as well as sacrilegious neglect of corpses and
funeral customs, become the stuff of everyday life. Am I talking about Syria in
June 2012? No. This is the situation in the Thebes run by Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone, currently in productionat
the National Theatre in London.

Antigone, under arrest, brought to Creon

Not that you would notice that the play is about tyranny and terror. The National
Theatre is now only interested in television stars, irony, and gimmicky special effects. For some time now I have been increasingly discomfited
by the social and political cowardice of its productions of the Classics.

It was disturbing when the 2008 Oedipus
starring Ralph Fiennes was 'sponsored by Shell', a company with a reputation for
cosying up to dictatorial regimes (some humourists at the time suggested the
connection could be explained by the parallel between the ancient Theban and modern Nigerian
experience of pollution). But last Wednesday
night, it was actually hard for me to keep still.

How is it possible that actors of the calibre of Christopher
Ecclestone and Jodie Whittaker can fail to engage us in a superb play about taking
a stand against a brutal despot who has the state army at his disposal? How can it be that there was no audience
reaction whatever when Sophocles’ answer to Bashar al-Assad threatened his
proletarian guardsman with slow death by torture?

Houla Outrage

How it is possible that in a
world where just last week dozens of children and women were slaughtered in
Houla, this Creon had been directed to play it for laughs when he called the bereaved and distraught sisters
Antigone and Ismene ‘neurotic’?

Don’t get me wrong.
I like radical, amusing and subversive adaptations and reappraisals of
canonical literature and drama. I LOVE having a good laugh in the theatre even
when—or especially when—the planet seems cruel and depressing. I don’t
particularly like being preached at about human rights by earnest liberal
thespians who have never been persecuted, either.

Antigone and Rosa Parks

But respect is required if you are going to
put on a masterpiece which has been performed, at personal risk to the
personnel involved, under conditions of state terror. Antigone has protested
against tyranny in Jaruzelski’s Poland and in apartheid South Africa, for the independence
movement in Manipur and for the mothers of the disappeared during the Dirty War in
Argentina (see Antigone on the World Stage ed. E. Mee & Helene Foley
[2011]). At the National Theatre she
comes over like a spoilt child who has been told by the manager of her riding
school that she has been excluded from the annual gymkhana. NUL POINTS, NT.